


Honor Every Part

by orphan_account



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-23
Updated: 2013-09-23
Packaged: 2017-12-27 11:24:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/978284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>murder family oneshot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Honor Every Part

"This is my family," she says with a bright smile, drawing back its head so sightless eyes can take in the two figures behind her, her fingers running through dry hair. The tang of blood hangs heavy in the stale air as she slides the knife through its flesh, patient, skilled. This is not the first or the second; the truth is she cannot remember how many there have been, but then she has no reason to keep count. They're not trophies. They're simply prey.

 _I am not a victim_ , she tells herself as she leans against the Bentley's doorframe, watching headlights pass in the other lane. Wounded, mutilated, surviving. She sits beside Will and reads a book as Hannibal fiddles with the stove, and she knows Will's not really reading along, just staring at the pages as he's lost in the labyrinth of his own mind, his hand on her knee. Days and weeks and moments blend together. Sometimes she's drugged, with her permission. It makes things easier.

_Take your power back._

She brushes her hair in front of a motel room mirror, gazing at the scar on her neck and the larger scar where her ear once was. Are they in North Dakota now, or South? Montana? She's forgotten. She wishes she could forget the girls, the accusations, the faces her own face looks like when she stares at her reflection too long and lets her vision blur. Sometimes she thinks of dyeing her hair, maybe blonde or Lounds red.

She feels ugly and guilty but she doesn't feel lost. She knows this is who she is, what she was always meant to be.

There is no map, no set of rules, no legal strictures to govern her. There is home and hunger, sunset and sunrise, teeth and tongues and hands and silence. Will is frantic, uncontrolled; Hannibal gentle and precise and exquisitely slow. It’s wrong in some abstract way, but what meaning does the word  _wrong_  have for people like them? She is at their mercy, she supposes, but sometimes a look in their eyes makes her think they might be at hers, too.

_I am not a victim. I am not a child. I am a hunter and the daughter of hunters._

The knife fits her hand and blood tastes sweet in her mouth and she is no longer afraid.

 

- 

 

"This is my family." He mumbles it under his breath, arms wrapped around himself to calm the shaking. It doesn't help. Abigail leans against the wall across the room and Hannibal nods, his usual ghost of a smile curving his lips, dark eyes glossy and unreadable as a spider's. Will's stomach roils.

_My name is Will Graham. It's two-thirty AM and I... and I..._

And he feels everything, even what he cannot remember, in visceral scents and half-glimpsed colors and breathless sweating panic. There's quiet, sometimes. There's calm. There are moments when he disassociates into some blank fog and watches himself, watches his gun fire, watches his mouth move against Abigail's, watches his hands clench and rumple immaculate tweed and silk.

 _A gun is power and fear._ He hears himself saying the words in front of his class, sees his own face on the projector screen. _A gun is for killers who do not want to get too close, either due to a worry of being physically overpowered or because they are distant from their victim. It is not passion and cruelty. It is putting down prey._

He needs to remember to pick up some new cleaner. It's getting harder and harder to get the blood spatter off his glasses.

The fork scrapes against his teeth.

Sometimes she calls him  _daddy_. He doesn't stop her.

The heat is unbearable, the sharpness he knows now is not a disease of the brain but one of the mind, one no amount of aspirin or anything else can lessen. Maybe he's not sick at all. Maybe the retreating, avoidant, awkward teacher-mask was the sickness and this new trembling killing wriggling mass is what he truly—

Hannibal hands him the knife and it's heavy, feels as heavy as his gun  _but that can't be right, that..._

 _It's four PM and I'm in North Carolina. My name is Will Graham._  

He draws a clock.

- 

 

 _This is my family._  The thought stirs a wistfulness in him, a warm sort of pride; he notes this curiously. The television hums and Abigail and Will are both asleep on the sofa. She's seated, her head leaning back and exposing the delicate scar on the side of her throat, while Will is curled beside her, his head resting in her lap, her limp fingers buried in his curls. Is there anything so vulnerable, so powerful as to hold such a thing in his hands, knowing that the choice is his? The choice to nurture or destroy—or perhaps to nurture through destruction, as one must cut away ruined flesh from a wound.

Love is peculiar. He muses on it often now. Bitter, spiked, clutching in the chest and growing there, tended or not. It might mean appreciating that which exists, but is it not also love to help someone reach their potential, to prune and bend, to guide?

They do not need him. They can exist without him.

He is the dark thing glimpsed in the corner of one's eye, the hollow place without color or sound, the void that draws all things toward it and cannot be understood. Even he does not always quite understand his own instincts and actions in regards to the two of them.

_Beauty, consumption, propriety._

Surely it must take trust for them to allow him to touch them, to press his lips to their bodies, to taste. Will had been the more frightened of the two, and still is. Death is not in his blood as it is in Abigail's, though he’s certainly more vicious. Desperation does that to a person.

The nomadic lifestyle is thoroughly unsuitable, but for now they have no choice. There is so much learning to do, and while he is skilled at blending in, at evading focus, his family is not. In truth he has put himself at great risk by having them with him, but the thought of abandoning them repulses him. They are not mere puppets or experiments. His instinct to manipulate and explore is at work, of course, but he also desires to care, to protect. The question of whether these are mutually exclusive in the end has not yet been answered to his satisfaction, and so for now it is both, the fervor of one not lessened by the other.

_They do not need me, but perhaps I—_

He lightly rubs Will's shoulder and kisses Abigail's forehead, then returns to the kitchen, alone.


End file.
